Sep
7
September Café Scientifique with Matthew Ramer and John Kramer
Posted by: jdewitt | September 7, 2015 | Leave a Comment
Dear Café Scientifiquers, our next café will happen on Tuesday September 29th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speakers for the evening will be Dr. Matthew Ramer and Dr. John Kramer. The title of their talk is:
Knowing Pains: How can we study pain to better treat it?
Pain is arguably the most useful of sensations. It is nature’s way of telling us to stop doing whatever it is we are doing in order to prevent damage, and to protect injured body parts during the healing process. In the absence of pain (in certain congenital conditions and in advanced diabetes, for example), the consequence can be loss of limbs and even of life.
There are circumstances, however, when pain serves no useful purpose: it persists when the injury has healed or occurs in the absence of any frank tissue damage, and is inappropriate in context (previously innocuous stimuli become painful) and magnitude (mildly painful stimuli become excruciating). This is called neuropathic pain and is incredibly difficult to treat because it is unresponsive to all of the drugs we use to treat normal, useful (“acute”) pain.
Ultimately, our research is aimed at finding new ways to minimise suffering from neuropathic pain. Prerequisites to this goal include understanding how normal and neuropathic pain are encoded and perceived by the nervous system, and accurately measuring and quantifying pain so that we can draw reasonable conclusions about whether or not a particular treatment is effective. We will discuss some historical and current ideas of how pain is transmitted from body to brain, and emphasize that the pain “channel” is not hard-wired, but like the process of learning, it is plastic, labile, and subject to “top-down” control. We will also tackle the contentious issue of pain measurement in the clinic and laboratory.